Everything a new venue does between signing up and taking the first real booking.
1. Create the account
Go to https://app.bookmyvenue.com.au/signup.
Signup is a verified-email flow, not a plain form:
- Enter your email address → Send code.
- BookMyVenue emails a short code. Enter it.
- Choose your business type (see below).
- Set a password. Minimum 12 characters.
- You land on the dashboard, already signed in.
The account you create is the Owner of the venue. Owner is the only role that cannot be removed and the only role that can see everything. Add everyone else afterwards from Team (see Team & roster).
Business type presets
Picking a business type is not cosmetic. It sets your modes, and it seeds a starter catalogue — services or a menu, opening hours, a roster, and sensible defaults — so the venue is usable on day one instead of empty.
Appointment businesses
| Preset | Seeded with |
|---|---|
| Remedial Massage / Myotherapy | Treatment sessions, Mon–Fri roster, deposit on the longest session |
| Physiotherapy | Ongoing treatment sessions, Mon–Fri |
| Hair Salon | Cuts, colour, styling — Tue–Sat |
| Barber | Cuts, fades, grooming — Mon–Sat |
| Nail Salon | Manicures, pedicures, enhancements — Tue–Sat |
| Beauty & Day Spa | Facials, massage, packages — Tue–Sat |
| Tattoo Studio | Sessions, Sat afternoons/evenings, new bookings require the artist's confirmation |
Hospitality businesses
| Preset | Seeded with |
|---|---|
| Restaurant | Tables, service windows, a three-course dinner menu |
| Cafe | A small floor, one all-day service window, coffee and breakfast menu |
| Bar | Tables and booths, an evening service window, drinks and bar snacks |
Everything a preset creates is yours to edit or delete. Nothing is locked.
If your business is not in the list, pick the closest one and edit. The preset only decides where you start.
Modes
A venue runs in one or more modes, and the mode decides what appears in the left-hand navigation:
| Mode | Unlocks |
|---|---|
appointments | Diary, New booking, Find booking, Waitlist, Clients, Services, Calendars, Import, Get the code |
hospitality | Orders, Menu, Floor, Till, Kitchen display, Dispatch |
dispatch | Delivery dispatch board |
Some sections — Dashboard, Team, Gift cards, Events, Promotions, Functions, Reports, Settings — appear for every venue regardless of mode.
How the navigation is grouped
Whatever your mode, the left-hand nav sorts itself into four groups, so the things you touch during service are not mixed in with the things you set once:
| Group | What lives there |
|---|---|
| Operate | The day itself — Dashboard, Diary, Orders, Floor, Till, Dispatch, Gift cards, Events, Functions, Waitlist, Clients |
| Configure | Things you set and leave — Services, Menu, Calendars, Import, Promotions, Get the code, Settings |
| Team | People, roster and pay |
| Insights | Reports |
A venue can run both: a hotel with a bistro and a day spa is appointments + hospitality. Changing modes after signup is a platform-admin action — email [email protected].
2. First-run checklist
Work down this list. It is ordered so nothing blocks anything later.
Settings → General & venue
- Venue name — what guests see on the booking page and in emails.
- Phone — see the warning below; this matters more than it looks.
- Email, Address, Max occupancy.
- Timezone and State — the state drives public-holiday awareness.
- Business day starts — for venues trading past midnight, this decides which trading day a 1am order belongs to. Reports and order numbering follow it.
- ABN and legal / registered business name — printed on tax invoices. 11 digits.
- Public address (slug) — the
<venue>inapp.bookmyvenue.com.au/book/<venue>. Change it early; changing it later breaks any link already in the wild.
⚠ Set the venue phone to a mobile (04xx) if you want to be texted about bookings. Venue-directed SMS cannot be delivered to a landline — the carrier rejects it and nothing arrives, with no error anywhere in the app. See Notifications.
Settings → Bookings & availability
- New bookings need my confirmation — on means every online booking arrives as pending and waits for you. Off means it is confirmed the moment it is made.
- Minimum booking notice — how close to the start time a guest may still book.
- Cancelling online — whether guests can cancel their own booking themselves.
- Hide cancelled bookings from the Diary — on if cancellations are clutter, off if you like seeing what fell out of the day.
- Connected calendars — if your practitioners keep their own Google or Outlook calendar, connect it so their busy times stop being bookable here. See Connected calendars.
Settings → Bookings & availability → closures
- Repeating days off (e.g. closed every Monday).
- One-off closures — public holidays, a week in January. Each has an optional staff-only reason.
Appearance
- Settings → Appearance & embed → Booking widget branding — your logo, a photo of the venue, and your real Google review score and review count. Guests check these, so use the real numbers.
Your catalogue
- Appointments → Services: name, price, duration, prep time before, clean-down after, notice needed, deposit, whether it is bookable online, and which practitioners perform it. See Appointments.
- Hospitality → Menu: categories, items, prices, per-channel availability. See Hospitality.
Team
- Add each staff member with the smallest role that lets them do their job. Money is Owner and Manager only. See Team & roster.
Payments
- Connect Stripe if you are taking deposits, ticket sales, gift cards or online payment. See Money & payments.
Notifications
- Review the guest templates (confirmation, reminder, cancellation, no-show follow-up, waitlist offer).
- Decide whether you want a text when a booking comes in — and read the two-gate rule in Notifications.
Your own booking notification emails carry a link that drops you straight into the diary without a password screen. Treat those emails as you would a key — see Notifications.
Go live on your own website
- Get the code → copy the snippet → paste it into your site. See Put booking on your website.
3. Test it before you announce it
Do this once, properly, before you send anyone to the booking page.
- Open your public booking page in a private/incognito window.
- Make a real booking as if you were a customer, using your own mobile and email.
- Check: did the confirmation email arrive? Did the text arrive?
- Check the Diary (appointments) or Orders (hospitality) — is it there, at the right time, with the right details?
- Cancel it from the guest's side and confirm it disappears from your diary.
- Delete the test booking if it left anything behind.
A booking that appears in your diary is not proof that the guest was emailed, and a notification that was queued is not proof that it was delivered. Check what arrived on your phone, not what the screen says.
4. Bringing your existing bookings and clients across
Appointments → Import takes a CSV or XLSX export — including a Fresha export — and brings clients and services in.
The flow is always: paste or upload → map columns → dry run → apply.
The dry run tells you how many rows would import, how many would be skipped, and flags rows that look wrong (duplicate, missing name, unparseable date). Read the flags before applying. Applying twice creates duplicates.
See Appointments.
Next
- Appointment venue → Appointments
- Hospitality venue → Hospitality
- Something is not working → Troubleshooting
Still stuck? Email [email protected] with your venue name, what you were doing and what happened instead. Please don't send passwords — we will never ask for one.